Before You Sell… Add Value To Your Maryland Home In 4 Simple Steps!

As soon as you decide that you will be putting your current property up for sale, no matter if it’s in Parkville, Perry Hall, Columbia, or Ellicott City, the same rules apply. No matter if you trying to sell very soon or at some point in the foreseeable future… you HAVE to get strategic about growing your property’s value and appeal to home purchasers in your local neighborhood. This process starts with a generous dollop of objectivity and a heaping spoonful of common sense because the decisions you are about to make are crucial.

The difficulty stems from a truth about how everybody perceives much of their property’s value. We escape from grind of daily living by retreating to the comfortable confines of our home—our place. A good part of its value to us and to our family is its sheer familiarity—the “hominess” that makes it our personal haven. But, if you take a step back from those “emotions”, you may begin to realize that some of the very things that make it so comfortable to us will be off-putting to outsiders—and what can never be forgotten is they are the prospective buyers.

Your awesome leather easy chair (the dark brown one that’s gotten a few shades lighter where we sit, and a little off-color where the spills happened) may look a bit off-putting to the untrained eye, but it’s been that way for years: who cares, right? WRONG! The back door needs to be bolted to stay shut…we do that without even thinking about it—hardly an issue, right? WRONG! The toilet in the master runs and runs unless you jiggle the handle a few times, no biggie a lot of toilet do that right? WRONG! The bathroom window that’s sort of stuck (okay, maybe it’s painted shut)…etc. etc. etc. You get the point, these are the items we are talking about.

Professionals are of one voice about the real value you add to a property when you go to the trouble of systematically depersonalizing it. It helps to approach doing that seriously, deliberately, and as completely as possible, and to tackle it in an organized manner. There are any number of ways to go about that, but here is one short, sweet, and simple way that will definitely pay off:

Step 1

Make a list. Sounds so simple right? Well, just about every successful mission, project, business, or productive full day started with a good list, so don’t ever underestimate its power! Starting from one end of your property, note with pencil and paper every single, solitary nit-picky detail that is other than what you would expect to find if it were a brand new home. This is not as easy as most people assume, because there will be such a great number of details, that

a) it will be very tempting to start skipping some of the minor ones (which you can never do), and

b) you will find it hard to resist the urge to start fixing the easy ones as you go along (don’t do it, RESIST THE URGE: you’ll derail the list-making!)

Step 2

After a decent interval, sit down with the list and re-classify each item into an “Easy Self-Fix List” and a “Professional-Attention-Needed List”.

Step 3

Get bids from the appropriate local professional tradespeople to tackle the”Professional-Attention-Needed List”, calculate which items can fit your budget, then schedule the work. Generally speaking, if monetarily you can’t get “everything” done, a good rule of thumb is to budget to remove as many possible within the budget, unless one or two items are major and need to be addressed immediately because of either safety or increasing damage, of course they should always take priority.

Step 4

Get started on your own endeavors to address the”Easy Self-Fix List”. You’ll be able to organize your own efforts to finish up about two weeks after the last of the tradespeople are scheduled to finish their projects (a two week grace period is realistic: you are aiming to finish everything about the same time).

Following these four steps will put you well on your way to increasing the value of your Maryland home, and increasing it’s overall appeal to buyers when you do decide to go ahead and put it on the market. So when it’s time to make that decision, we hope you’ll look to Maryland’s Largest In-State Brokerage, ExecuHome Realty, to guide you through the process. We help over 2,000 Maryland Homeowners per year in the successful sale of their homes, and we can’t wait to help you. Call us at 443-632-3800.